Shane Markstrum. Staking Claims: A History of Programming Language Design Claims and Evidence. A Positional Work in Progress. In Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU). 2010.
While still a relatively young field, computer science has a vast body of knowledge in the domain of programming languages. When a new language is introduced, its designers make claims which distinguish their language from previous languages. However, it often feels like language designers do not feel a pressing need to back these claims with evidence beyond personal anecdotes. Peer reviewers are likely to agree.
In this paper, we present preliminary work which revisits the history of such claims by examining a number of language design papers which span the history of programming language development.We focus on the issue of claimevidence correspondence, or determining how often claims are or are not backed by evidence. These preliminary results confirm that unsupported claims have been around since the inception of higher level programming in the 1950s. We stake a position that this behavior is unacceptable for the health of the research community.We should be more aware of valiant and effective efforts for supplying evidence to support language design claims.